


Other Ghost Stories

by soroga



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Azure Moon - Freeform, Dimitri isn't here but it's still about him, Gen, Implied war crimes, Past Rape/Non-con, Set mid-timeskip, outsider pov
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-25
Updated: 2020-08-25
Packaged: 2021-03-07 01:35:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,177
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26098732
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/soroga/pseuds/soroga
Summary: Two men show up on Orianne's doorstep, chasing the One-Eyed Demon.He isn't there. But something of him lingers.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 28
Collections: FE3H Kink Meme





	Other Ghost Stories

On an ordinary day in the Great Tree Moon, two strangers knock on Orianne's door. 

She sees them through the oiled-paper windows looking out onto her porch, their silhouettes vague and their voices muffled. She can tell they don't stand like soldiers, but not much else. 

Orianne still keeps her largest knife tucked in her hand as she cracks the door open a bare inch, just enough to see them in the flesh. Two men, a tall one with red hair and a shorter one with black, and rich. The rich ones always give it away with the way they look at her, even if she couldn't tell the fineness of their armor. 

The redhead gives her a practiced smile. "Hey there," he says, like he's a friend dropping by. Orianne's grip tightens on her knife. "I'm Sylvain Gautier, and this is my friend Felix, Felix Fraldarius. Can we come in?" 

Orianne scoffs and shuts the door on his lying mouth. 

He keeps banging on her door while she scrambles to the kitchen for her big cast-iron pan. _Two_ lords on her doorstep, this close to Fhirdiad? They’re obviously more con artists, here to promise gold while taking away what little they have left, and all the more despicable because they clearly aren’t desperate.

Not being desperate means they’re probably well-fed. That's bad enough before factoring in that there’s two of them. She might be able to scare away one with a knife, but against two she’s better off with a bit more distance if worst comes to worst. 

And it seems like it might - they don’t move onto an easier target. The one who spoke before is talking still, apologizing to her meaninglessly. “But we really do need to talk to you,” he says, and Orianne stashes her knife in her apron pocket to grip her pan with both hands. If this fool breaks down her door, she might not want to kill him, but she’ll still swing at him as hard as she can.

Before it can come to that, there’s an impatient noise from outside. “ _Move_ , Sylvain,” the other one says, and then she hears a scrabbling at her window. 

Orianne’s heart lodges itself in her throat. Again. It’s happening again.

Her eyes drift to the open doorway behind her and the room beyond it for a second before she tears them back to her window, where the greased paper is starting to dent inwards at the edges. Just the one, so far. She doesn’t have a back door, so they can’t surround her. Could she have a chance, if she hits the first one as he comes through? 

She swallows and inches closer, frying pan high over her head as a hand snakes its way into the newly-made gap under the paper - 

And stays there, palm up, fingers opening to show the ring inside. One with a signet that even Orianne, who only knows the crests of the territories from the symbols stamped on the boxes at the market, recognizes. 

She deflates all at once, lowering her frying pan. 

“...so, can we come in now?” _Sylvain Gautier_ asks through her door. 

She has half a mind to tell them no. But she can’t, not really, so instead she doesn’t bother to put her pan down before she hauls the door open, scowling at the sheepish (Gautier) and surly (Fraldarius) faces that stare back at her. 

“Well, now that you’ve ruined my window, you might as well,” she sniffs. 

Lord Fraldarius untangles his hand from her window and manages to beat Lord Gautier inside, brushing past him with his arms crossed. “Your window is fine,” he says. “I didn’t even tear the paper.”

Orianne crosses her arms right back, as if that will protect her. Her pan is a reassuring weight where it presses against her hip. “Oh, so you didn’t rip it out of its frame? Look at it, it’s flapping in the breeze and letting all the bugs in. And you know when I close the shutters tonight they’ll tear right through the paper if it’s not where it should be, and who exactly is supposed to fix it?”

Lord Fraldarius’s sullen frown deepens. “Ugh, fine. I’ll fix it.” 

That wasn’t what she had been aiming for, but Orianne doesn’t stop him as he turns to her window and starts trying to awkwardly shove the paper back into its tiny slot. Let him wrestle with it. Orianne’s not one of those people who thinks nobles shouldn’t sully their hands with ordinary work. Besides, Orianne’s fingers didn’t shrink back down after she’d given birth, so _she’s_ certainly not going to do it.

And this way, there’s as much distance between them as she can get. 

This does leave her with Lord Gautier, though, who smiles at her again as he closes the door gently. 

She doesn’t smile back. “What do you want?” 

“Wow, right to it,” Lord Gautier says. “Can we maybe sit?” 

Orianne gestures sarcastically at her little round table with its single wooden chair, her spinning wheel abandoned on it and half-obscured by Lord Fraldarius’s shifting shadow as he wrestles with her window. 

“Oh.” Lord Gautier blinks. “Okay. Sorry. We’re here because we heard you spent some time with someone we’re looking for. People in town called him the One-Eyed Demon, but we think he’s a friend of ours.”

Orianne puts down her frying pan and sits.

Orianne used to have glass windows and a table with four chairs and a family to fill them. But that was before the Imperial soldiers came, looting and pillaging, laughing as they set fires and stole heirlooms. 

They didn’t need to. Orianne can’t imagine they were ordered to. She’d seen the truth on their faces as they stabbed her brother and pushed her down next to his corpse. It hadn’t been a duty for them; it had been a bit of _fun_ , less boring than working, but monotonous in its own way. If those soldiers had lived, they probably wouldn’t remember Orianne’s face at all.

She doesn’t tell the lords in her sitting room about the pain or the fear or the horrible way that suffering became ordinary after a while. She only tells them about the night when it suddenly wasn’t any more.

“It wasn’t dark,” she says. “There was fire everywhere. But he still appeared out of nowhere, like a vengeful spirit. He took a man’s head in one hand and squeezed it until it burst before I even knew he was there.”

The man had been on top of her, and then suddenly he was dead, and Orianne had looked up into the empty eyes of her savior before he’d turned away from her to wrap his bare hands around another man’s throat.

“He killed all of them,” Orianne says. “All the Imperial soldiers who were plaguing the village. Three scores of men, most likely, and he…” 

Lord Gautier frowns, troubled. But Lord Fraldarius, finally finished fiddling with her windows, just nods, his mouth a grim line. “Did he fight like a beast or a man?” He asks.

Orianne’s mouth opens, but nothing comes out. What man or beast could take a soldier by his arms and tear him in half just by pulling on them? 

Finally, she says, “like a demon. He fought like nothing of this world.” 

The lords exchange a glance that Orianne can’t read before Lord Gautier speaks. “Did he talk to you?” He asks. “Or did you hear him talk to anyone else?”

Orianne starts shaking her head, but Lord Fraldarius must catch her hesitation, because his eyes narrow. “He did,” he says. “But not to you.” 

_You will be avenged,_ he’d whispered again and again once the fields had been soaked with Imperial blood and he’d stood alone in it all, hardly seeming to notice the corpses under his feet. _You will be avenged._ But it had sounded less like an oath and more like a plea that had long gone unanswered. 

“To other spirits, perhaps,” she says.

Lord Fraldarius scoffs, and Orianne’s grip tightens on her knife, still hidden within her apron pocket.

She wishes in that moment she had more chairs just so they’d stop looming above her. They’re not Imperials, she reminds herself. They claim to be the demon’s friend. 

The demon did not seem like he had any friends.

“What happened then?” Lord Gautier asks.

“I took him by the hand,” Orianne says, her own hand flexing as she remembers how gentle his grip had been. “Took him here.” Her home had looked even worse back then, the parts that could burn still smoldering, but the demon had said nothing. He’d said nothing to her as she’d tried to clean the worst of the blood from him, only pleaded with other demons as she’d tried to take his armor off to see if he’d been hurt. When she’d finally given up he’d curled up on the floor, shaking like a beaten dog. 

Orianne had curled up on the floor right beside him, and she’d slept peacefully in her own home for the first time in months.

When she woke, he was gone, only the bloodstains all over her floor and the filthy cloak laid down gently over Orianne herself left as evidence that he’d ever been there. 

“He pushed me down onto the ground,” she says, finally meeting Lord Gautier’s eyes. “His lust for blood had been satisfied, but demons lust for more than that. It was nothing like laying with a human man.” 

Lord Gautier’s eyes go wide. His mouth drops open, but he is struck speechless. 

Lord Fraldarius isn’t. “She’s lying,” he says, glaring at her. 

“About what?” Orianne asks, glaring back. “The demon existing? His monstrous strength, the men he slew, the reward he took after? He left me with child, a sign of his protection over this village. Am I lying about that?”

Lord Gautier leans forward, attention caught. “Can we see the child?”

Orianne draws back, hand sliding half out of her apron pocket, the hilt of her knife still hidden by the table. “She’s favored by forces beyond any of our understanding,” she warns. “The people of the village won’t greet you so warmly if you harm her, even if you are nobles.”

She doesn’t go into town if she can help it, but when she does, someone always stops her to rub her baby’s head. For luck, for health, for a chance to grow again, despite everything.

It’s nothing like how they treat the half-Imperial bastards, or their unfortunate mothers.

Lord Fraldarius rolls his eyes. “We don’t need to see her,” he says. “ _Sylvain_. You know she’s lying. He wouldn’t.” 

“It’s been a long time,” Lord Gautier says, though Orianne can tell that he doesn’t quite mean it. “We don’t know. Maybe we should have a look at the baby, just in case. Maybe Dimitri - ”

It’s as if someone spoke the name of the Goddess. Orianne and Lord Fraldarius both recoil as Lord Gautier cuts himself off a moment too late. But Lord Fraldarius looks as though he’s been struck while Orianne can’t stop the laughter that suddenly comes bubbling out of her. 

“You think the demon is the _prince_?” She shrieks, her shoulders shaking. It’s foolish, especially with the way both lords frown at her, but she can’t help it, not with these two men trying to carve a prince out of the shadow of a ghost, as if they never grew past tales for children.

“The demon is no mortal man,” she says once she gets her breath back. “Even if he is the shade of the prince, he isn’t the prince any more, and he never will be again.” 

Lord Fraldarius turns on his heel and slams her door shut behind himself with such violence that the whole house shakes. 

Orianne scowls up at the roof, which lets a warning cloud of dust down on her. Despite her best efforts, she never got all the ash out, and perhaps never will. 

Worse still, the baby starts crying in the next room, awake again and unhappy about it.

“Well?” She scowls at Lord Gautier as she suppresses a cough. “Aren’t you satisfied yet? The child can’t practice any dark arts yet, if you were hoping for a show.” 

Lord Gautier sighs, but accepts his dismissal, opening her door much more gently before pausing there. “Your baby,” he says. “What did you name her?” 

“Camille,” Orianne says.

“Camille, huh,” Lord Gautier says. With his face turned to the sun, Orianne can’t read it at all, but there’s something wistful in his voice. “Nice name.” 

And like that, he’s gone.

Orianne only lets go of her knife to pick Camille up. The girl doesn’t stop crying, even when Orianne rocks her, but Orianne’s used to this, and to the little fist that grabs her dark hair and pulls sharply enough to hurt. 

“Strong, like your father,” Orianne murmurs to her, as if saying it enough times can make it true. “And merciful. 

“Always merciful.”


End file.
